What Your Job Will Be LikeWe are seeking highly motivated computer engineer to assist with a broad range of challenging technical problems associated with intrusion detection of physical threats to national assets from unauthorized people, vehicles, and autonomous platforms (drones or unmanned aerial vehicles). The successful candidate will work in an innovative, multi-disciplinary team environment to develop and integrate solutions for our national security.
On any given day, you may be called on to:
- Formulate algorithmic and machine learning approaches to solve data analysis and target localization and classification tasks.
- Write clean, efficient, and well-documented code for physical security system implementations.
- Develop machine learning models and integrate them into autonomous platforms.
- Design and implement robotic systems for various applications such as surveillance and tracking.
- Assist other staff as a contributor on both customer and internally funded projects.
- Work in a sensor testing and data collection team, in both indoor and outdoor field settings.
- Analyze and visualize large datasets from intrusion sensors, UAS, and other sources.
- Develop and execute test plans, integrate hardware and software, conduct experiments, and analyze results to advise government sponsor decisions.
- Troubleshoot issues with existing code and collaborate with colleagues to resolve technical challenges.
- Write proposals for internally or externally funded R&D projects.
- Summarize and present results to other staff and sponsors and develop papers and briefings for publication.
- Collaborate with cross-functional teams to identify project requirements and develop solutions that meet those needs.
- Stay up-to-date with emerging trends and technologies in robotics, machine learning, and UAS technology.
Due to the nature of the work, the selected applicant must be able to work onsite.
Salary Range$102,400 - $199,700
*Salary range is estimated, and actual salary will be determined after consideration of the selected candidate's experience and qualifications, and application of any approved geographic salary differential.
Qualifications We Require- Bachelor's degree in a relevant discipline, or an equivalent combination of directly relevant education and engineering or scientific experience that demonstrates the knowledge, skills, and ability to perform independent research and development.
- Active DOE L or higher level clearance or equivalent
Qualifications We DesireThe ideal R&D S&E Computer Engineering candidate for Sandia National Laboratories will in addition possess the following:
- Graduate degree in Computer Engineering or a highly related field where an independent research project was a graduation requirement (e.g., independent project, thesis, or dissertation).
- Demonstrated ability to execute and deliver technical work products with application of appropriate rigor and pedigree documentation (design/code reviews, technical oversight/approvals, project team concurrence, artifact generation, etc.).
- Experience in computer systems design and software development for real-time and embedded processing systems, distributed processing systems, or real-time client server implementations.
- Familiarity with hardware/software requirements generation for verification, validation and qualifications
- Demonstrated interpersonal skills and ability to work in a multidisciplinary, multi-disciplinary team setting for a common purpose.
Also, for this posting we are seeking individuals with the following experience:
- Strong knowledge of computer vision, deep learning, and reinforcement machine learning techniques.
- Strong written communication skills (e.g., published research in technical journals)
- Desire to work on solutions to National Security problems, especially in counter-autonomy and physical security system applications.
- Experience with S3 buckets, OpenCV, and dynamic visualization of sensor data.
- Demonstrated ability to perform machine learning related activities such as pipeline development, model explainability, and uncertainty quantification.
- Strong teamwork and leadership skills.
- Ability to travel domestically and internationally as needed (less than 15% of the time).
- Experience with C++, Python, Go, JavaScript, TypeScript, or similar languages.
- Experience with GPU, embedded, or constrained-compute inference optimization.
- Familiarity with CUDA, TensorRT, ONNX Runtime, NVIDIA Triton, NVIDIA DeepStream, OpenCV, PyTorch, or comparable frameworks.
- Experience training, evaluating, or deploying computer-vision models.
- Understanding of multi-sensor fusion, track correlation, time alignment, coordinate transformation, confidence handling, and uncertainty management.
- Experience integrating third-party sensors, vendor hardware, or externally developed software components.
About Our TeamThe Mission of department 6554 is to counter evolving autonomous threats to key national facilities and to improve the performance of physical security systems protecting those sites. We are part of a larger group focused on Autonomy and Unmanned Systems. We address real-world problems through research, development, testing, and evaluation of components and systems to advance the science of physical security. This enables customers to mitigate threats to these facilities by improving the ability to sense, assess, track, and respond to physical incursions. Our work addresses current physical security operational challenges and evolving threats such as unmanned aircraft systems (UAS). We specialize in the testing and evaluation of Counter-UAS (C-UAS) systems, which counter the danger posed by UAS, and we are a C-UAS test agent for DOE, NNSA, and DHS.
Posting DurationThis posting will be open for application submissions for a minimum of three (3) calendar days, including the 'posting date'. Sandia reserves the right to extend the posting date at any time.
Security ClearancePosition requires a Department of Energy (DOE) L security clearance to start, or equivalent active security clearance with another U.S. government agency (e.g., DOD).
